This Week in Photography: Upheaval in Ukraine, New Hasselblad Camera, and a Fired AP Photog

Why hello beautiful reader, your fine taste in media is about to pay dividends. Every week you place your eyes in our hands and we take the responsibility seriously, collecting only the finest photo stories for your perusal. So without further ado here’s your prime cut of photo news and tidbits from the photo world. See you next week!

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Video Reveals the Hidden Flight Patterns of Birds

This video shows the beautiful patterns and organization of starlings’ movements by adding a couple of seconds of delay to their motions at sunset. Shot by Dennis Hlynsky, an artist and professor at Rhode Island School of Design, the video, one of a series, makes it much easier for the viewer to make sense of the otherwise chaotic activity. As Hlynsky says in the description, it really starts to get good at around 6 minutes.

Using a Panasonic DSLR camera and Adobe After Effects for color correction, tonal adjustments, and to sustain each frame for 2 seconds, Hlynsky says a large, heavy tripod is critical since the behavior he’s capturing happens at sunset, when light is ever shifting. Hlynsky is also interested in social networks, to which these bird formations can easily be equated, and has done work in the field of software for online media.

In addition to art and web application design, Hlynsky has a history with patterns in the sky. He was the designer of fireworks celebrations for Providence, RI for five years, among many other community arts events. He first started filming these videos in 2005, using a simple Flip video camera.

AP Cuts Ties With Photographer Over Altered Photo

Photo: Narciso Contreras/AP

Narciso Contreras was a Pulitzer Prize winning freelance photographer working for the Associated Press, until they discovered that he had done what many people do these days — used Photoshop to remove a small but distracting item from a photo. The photo was taken September 29 of last year, and depicts a Syrian opposition fighter ducking for cover during a gunfight in the hotly contested Telata village just outside of Syria. AP does allow its photographers to use software to lighten or darken photographs, what they call “minor adjustments,” but according to its ethics policy, only these small types of changes are acceptable.

The original image (top) shows part of another photographer’s video camera in the lower lefthand corner. In the second photo the gear has been (very effectively) removed from the shot using the common cloning technique available in Photoshop and other software.

The AP have removed all of his nearly 500 photographs from their archives, and say they’ve found no evidence of other visual retouching. This sort of thing has a tendency to crop up, and has bitten photographers before. One of the simplest rules in photojournalism pertains to retouching photos, and it’s easy to remember: Don’t do it.

Photos From Ukraine’s Upheaval

Photo: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty

The Atlantic’s In Focus posted a collection of images illustrating the violent protests in Ukraine last week, which resulted in the death of at least two protesters. The resulting photographs depict what looks more akin to a medieval battle than an anti-government protest. Seemingly endless armies of helmeted riot police armed with shields and batons were met with Molotov cocktails, fireworks even war machines – e.g., a DIY trebuchet used to throw stones at government forces. The violence was spawned after months of demonstrations over President Viktor Yanukovich’s decision to veto an EU integration pact – a decision that came with swift anti-protest legislation intended to quell any further demonstrations in central Kiev.

Hasselblad Announces Massively Megapixeled CMOS Camera

Teaser for Hasselblad’s new 50MP CMOS camera, set to be released in March.

Hasselblad, the renowned camera maker whose products NASA chose to send to the moon, is planning to launch a whopping 50MP medium format camera with less expensive and power-hungry CMOS sensor. The H5D-50c is set to go on sale in March, and is geared toward a wider variety of users than its usually highly specialized cameras. The pricing is set to come out in March. Make no mistake, despite the wider appeal this thing is unlikely to break the Hasselblad tradition of being very, very expensive.

Hasselblad recently replaced its CEO, now Ian Rawcliffe, who says “This is a world-first and underpins Hasselblad’s status at the forefront of camera technology. It will be the first of a number of medium-format capture innovations we have planned for the coming months.” If you own a house you never use and are in the market for a new camera, March might be your lucky month.

Never-Before-Seen Photos of Queen Victoria on Display in California

Queen Victoria in the less regalia than we’re used to seeing, part of ‘A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography’ exhibition opening at the Getty.

More than 200 previously unseen photos from the Royal British archives are going on display in LA, including several of the storied Queen Victoria. Victoria, who ruled for 63 years — the longest in British history — gave the Victorian Age its name. Famously reclusive after her husband Prince Albert died, some of her private life will now be on display at the Getty Center as part of A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography.

Some photos will include portraits, visits to her Scottish retreat, and time spent with Prince Albert. Others will be more candid, likely to include her and her nine children. The life of the Royals is always the source of a lot of kvetching, especially in Britain, but the royal weddings and jubilees garner plenty of attention stateside as well. If you have a royal itch that needs scratching, this exhibition will be at the Getty in Los Angeles as of February 4th.

Syria and the Perpetrator Photography Genre

Most of the conflict photographs we’re used to seeing are taken by photojournalists who risk their lives in order to document and expose the horrors of war. These images are made with the intention of educating the public and unintentionally, but understandably, often have an anti-war bent.

With that in mind, we’d like to acknowledge how horrifying it’s been to see the 55,000 images recently released that allegedly document the beating and death of some 11,000 detainees in Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s jails. These images are shocking by themselves, but made even worse by the fact that they weren’t taken with the intention to educate, but instead with what seems to be the purpose of celebrating, or at least boasting about, the destruction of 11,000 human lives.

In her recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Susie Linfield rightly labels the photos as “bewildering,” but also adeptly points out that as shocking as these images are, they’re really nothing new. The Nazis did something similar, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl falls into this same category. So do the photos from Abu Ghraib, which show American soldiers celebrating torture. We’ve been seeing what she calls “perpetrator photography” for a long time and unfortunately will likely see more in the future.

New Exhibit: What Is a Photograph?

There are some outliers at the edges of the photographic community; photographers who make work that doesn’t fit into the normal confines of the genre. Their work isn’t always discernible as photography and they’re constantly pushing the limits of the medium. These folks are the subject of a new exhibit at the International Center of Photography called What is a Photograph?, which opened Friday and runs through May 4.

The exhibit features several up and coming artists, but also highlights the work of artists who’ve been blowing up the boundaries for years, such as Floris Neusüss, who is famous for the photogram and the camera-less photograph, and Gerhard Richter who is famous in part for his photorealist paintings.